Becoming the Second City: Chicago's Mass News Media, 1833-1898

Abstract

Richard Junger's account of nineteenth-century Chicago will seem warmly familiar to readers who know that city's history, and generally entertaining to those who do not. Junger's book identifies a gap in our knowledge of the press that historians have not adequately filled. Although Chicago's contributions to the American newspaper business are legendary, its press has never attracted the systematic analysis it deserves, in part because of the sheer unruliness and scale of any such project, in part because the Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed so many crucial early records. The book's title leads readers to expect an analysis of how the daily press contributed to what Junger calls “Chicago's first-city crusade” (p. 192). He notes many examples of Chicago's self-conscious efforts to portray itself as the emerging dominant American city, although the book does not offer much evidence for the press's role in coordinating an ongoing, deliberate crusade. Windy self-promotion was the norm in most western cities of the nineteenth century, as Daniel Boorstin noted years ago in The Americans: The National Experience (1965). After the Civil War, Chicago had reasons to take its own dreams more seriously. Even then, however, the crusade seemed more urgent at some moments than others, as when newspaper editors and reporters vigorously promoted the city as a site for the 1893 world's fair or debated the accuracy of census statistics, hoping to gain an edge over New York. In long sections of the book, the Chicago-press-as-first-city-booster theme nearly disappears.